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A personal reflection on the death of Thatcher

– By Barry Faulkner When I reflected upon the day my heart felt heavy but I felt I could not celebrate as I thought I would, I had anticipated this moment for so long. I had imagined every moment of the day, how I would feel, how I would react, yet whe …

When I reflected upon the day my heart felt heavy but I felt I could not celebrate as I thought I would, I had anticipated this moment for so long. I had imagined every moment of the day, how I would feel, how I would react, yet when the moment came, I wasn’t in my home city of Liverpool, the place she appeared to despise so much, the city that dealt her such harsh blows, the place where her plan failed even if just temporarily.

I found myself in London, the capital of her success, yet so many here were also effected by her misery and disillusioned by her despair. I felt out of sorts, I didn’t want to shout or scream or laugh or cry, it was a kind of emptiness, the loss of someone whose loss I had given so much thought to yet whose final demise came more like a whisper that a cheer.

I had to start to interrogate my feelings to identify what was at the root of my failure to react, I swiftly determined it was that the pain she had inflicted was deep and damaging, yet she mattered so little to me.

Maybe it was because she had tapered away rather than left us by any more just means, one pondered upon in Brighton, imagined the angry mass of the proletariat tearing her limb from limb yet recognised that her candle was extinguished in a much calmer manner.

I thought of times well gone and what she triumphed as her greatest achievement: Blair. I considered whether for a second she had won, then recalled the pain, the misery, the hopelessness and the disempowerment she had brought to our communities.

She is gone! She is gone! We can sing it from the rooftops yet it makes little difference to the bitter legacy that remains, the legacy of a political desert, bereft of substance, the desert of values and principles sold out to the corporate giants and the philosophy of greed.

So how do we move forward? How do we build from the ashes of that dreadful legacy? How do we recreate the concept of good over evil?

Deep inside every human being is the air of humanity, when faced with the cruellest of circumstance we find good and we build hope and vision. There can never be a point at which we lose all hope as this is what drives us, what shapes us and what determines our direction.

As Che once said, “all revolutionaries are guided by feelings of love.”

Walton Pantland

South African trade unionist living in Glasgow. Loves whisky, wine, running and the great outdoors. Walton did an MA in Industrial Relations at Ruskin, Oxford, and is interested in how trade unions use new technology to organise.